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There’s a new movement in America that’s gaining serious attention from Washington officials. This burgeoning political force has met with top staffers of more than 100 lawmakers, had private sessions with aides to all to the major presidential candidates, and has begun to make its presence known in congressional districts all across the country.
Is this a grassroots push by America’s working people? Are they finally getting the hearing they’ve long been denied by the political elites? Hardly. This is a surreptitious, slick, astroturf campaign being run by firms in India that work with U.S. corporate executives to outsource the jobs of American workers to cheap labor in Indian cities.
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The political front for this campaign is an outfit called The National Association of Software and Service Companies, and it is working straight from the playbook of corporate lobbying: throw money around, hire connected influence peddlers, recruit sympathetic faces to front for your agenda, create a fake image of grassroots support… and tell the biggest lie you can dream up.
This group’s lie is that outsourcing America’s middle-class jobs is – get this – good for America! They’ve enlisted CEOs of our big outsourcing corporations to deliver this lie to congress and to write op-ed pieces that spread the lie. The group’s honcho says that it has also bought access to such insider think tanks as Brookings and Heritage Foundation, asserting that the outsourcing lobby can then supply materials to these American organizations so they can “write a good paper on the global trade in services.”
This is nothing but propaganda. The goal of this dishonest lobbying campaign is to keep our own political leaders from standing up for the millions of American working families whose middle-class possibilities are being shut off by corporate outsourcing and downsizing. They intend to drown out these millions of voices with their millions of dollars.
“Lobbying in U.S. Indian Firms Present an American Face,” The New York Times, September 4, 2007